Berkeley, California - April 29, 2005, - Vela Design Group today announced VelaClock 1.0, a world clock widget that provides local times, daylight hours and moon phase information for cities throughout the world. VelaClock is one of the first commercial offerings of a new breed of software taking advantage of the Dashboard feature in Apple's Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger".

"VelaClock's ability to provide up-to-date time zone information will set it apart from the competition," said Chuck Soper, CEO of Vela Design Group. "VelaClock will be invaluable to Tiger users who travel or communicate with friends and colleagues around the world. Educators will find the detailed information about the sun and moon a useful instructional aid."

"The simplicity of creating Dashboard widgets for Tiger gives developers an exciting new opportunity to use their imagination and talent," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "VelaClock is a great example of an elegant and helpful widget which we're pleased to see added to the collection."

VelaClock displays an image of the moon as seen in the sky above the currently selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle at which the moon's crescent appears to be rotated from the vertical. Because this angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated once a minute. The boundary of the illuminated region of the moon is also updated every minute, resulting in accurate depiction of the moon's phase. The name of the current moon phase is provided, as well as local times for the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).

A bar gives the user a picture of the 24 hours of natural light (bright daylight, three levels of twilight, and night) for the current day. This feature enables users to gain a better sense of daylight hours for cities both faraway and nearby.

To accurately provide local times for locations around the globe VelaClock depends on a public domain time zone database called "tz database." This database is arguably the most accurate time zone database available. Besides local times, the relative time can be displayed. The relative time shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current time zone, as set in the System Preferences. For each city displayed, the corresponding country flag is shown.